Dictionary.com has a translator, but it kinda sucks. I’m guessing that verb conjugation is the tricky part, but I’m quite possibly wrong. Is there a website that makes more accurate translations?
Alta Vista’s Babel Fish gives good results.
“Good”? Depends what you mean by good…
An on-line translator (Ok, I didn’t try them all;maybe there’s some marvel out there I never used) can be used to understand the general meaning of a text. Say, an article written in a language you don’t understand. But they’re never “accurate”. You shouldn’t use them when you need to understand exactly what is written or to be understood clearly. An example that comes to my mind is the guy who had reserved an hotel room and wanted to specify the kind of room he wanted to stay in. He sent a very short babelfish-translated e-mail that was completely mangled. If I remember correctly the hotel staff misunderstood the message and assumed he wanted to cancel his reservation.
People have fun translating back and forth using babelfish or similar translator for a reason (there’s such a thread currently in “cafe society” : guess what was originally this famous quote"). It’s fun because online-translators are unable to deliver an accurate translation.
I can’t resist, of course : here’s the result of the english —> french ---->english translation of the last part of my post :
“People have the recreation translating in the two directions using the babelfish or of the similar translator for a reason (there is such a wire currently in the “coffee company”: conjecture what was in the beginning this quotation famous”). It is recreation because as line-translators cannot provide a precise translation."
I think this example is sufficient. Online translators allow you to understand or at least guess the general meaning, but these translations aren’t “good” nor “accurate” (a simple english–> french translation would have been sufficient to prove that these translations are very poor (at best), but of course most people, not knowing french, wouldn’t have been able to notice how awful the translation was )
While I’m at it , babelfish translating the OP in spanish :
“Dictionary.com tiene un traductor, pero un poco aspira. Estoy conjeturando que la conjugación del verbo es la parte difícil, pero soy absolutamente posiblemente incorrecto. ¿Hay un Web site que haga traducciones más exactas?”
Spanish readers should understand roughly what you meant but will likely be puzzled by the “un poco aspira” and “absolumente posiblemente” parts…
By the way, this last example shows that the problem is more often idiomatics (or sentence structure) than conjugations. The meaning of “sucks” and “quite possibly” can’t be conveyed by a “word by word” translation. And your skillfully written english sentence becomes a complete mess of words in a more or less random order).
Actually, conjugations aren’t the most important important part to convey meaning. You could probably be understood in most languages even if you didn’t know the conjugations. You probably could get way with, for instance “Yo querer comer mañana” , but most probably not with “la comida aspira”.
What clairobscur said. Babelfish and Google and any online translator can sometimes express the general idea, but neither is at all reliable. I would only recommend them (and then partially) for translating into English, in cases in which you want to gain a very basic knowledge of the subject matter. As far as translating into other languages, or for trying to communicate with another person, they’re pretty useless.
I teach Spanish and have students that have tried to write their compositions through an online translator, and the results are just bizarre. While a normal student in introductory Spanish will tend to mentally translate an English sentence into a (kinda) Spanish one, thus translating too literally, the online translator will make mistakes that even the poorest student wouldn’t.
I think the major difficulties (from going to English to Spanish) are compound verb tenses (‘I used to go skiing’, or ‘I needed to be sure it would be correct’) because they wreak havoc with the translator - where the former example could be translated with one word in Spanish, the translator will see ‘used’ as a verb. They are often confused by idioms or by words that have multiple meanings, like ‘around’, in English, and often choose incorrectly. They can’t reliably recognize words that are homonyms in one language (eg, in Spanish, the word muñeca means ‘doll’ and ‘wrist’). Of course, prepositions, given their irregularity are another problem. And vocabulary is often limited (translators tend not to recognize slang or more academic/ obscure vocabulary).
So no, there aren’t really any good online translators. I would, however, recommend online verb conjugators (in Spanish, at least). You can simply enter a verb and the find any conjugation you need.
I think the translator at Systransoft.com works marginally better than Babelfish. But if you know any Romance languages it might be better to find a good dictionary and do the legwork yourself.
Reported
I guess it depends on what you are trying to translate. I found Google quite adequate when translating French Railway timetables for example. I would not expect it to do well with colloquial or colorful language however.
I did the double translation trick with the above and it came out well I think.
I guess it depends on what you’re trying to translate. I found Google quite adequate when translating the schedules of the French railways, for example. I do not expect him to do well with familiar or colorful language.